Rainer Maria Rilke quotes - page 2

Just as language has no longer anything in common with the thing it names, so the movements of most of the people who live in cities have lost their connection with the earth they hang, as it were, in the air, hover in all directions, and find no place where they can settle. (Rainer Maria Rilke)
No experience has been too unimportant, and the smallest event unfolds like a fate, and fate itself is like a wonderful, wide fabric in which every thread is guided by an infinitely tender hand and laid alongside another thread and is held and supported by a hundred others.
Rainer Maria Rilke
Rose, oh pure contradiction, desire, To be no one's sleep under so many Lids.
Rainer Maria Rilke
I am so afraid of people's words. They describe so distinctly everything: And this they call dog and that they call house, here the start and there the end.I worry about their mockery with words, they know everything, what will be, what was; no mountain is still miraculous; and their house and yard lead right up to God.I want to warn and object: Let the things be! I enjoy listening to the sound they are making. But you always touch: and they hush and stand still. That's how you kill.
Rainer Maria Rilke
Once the realization is accepted that even between the closest human beings infinite distances continue, a wonderful living side by side can grow, if they succeed in loving the distance between them which makes it possible for each to see the other whole against the sky.
Rainer Maria Rilke
Live your questions now, and perhaps even without knowing it, you will live along some distant day into your answers.
Rainer Maria Rilke
Everything terrible is something that needs our love.
Rainer Maria Rilke
I live not in dreams but in contemplation of a reality that is perhaps the future.
Rainer Maria Rilke
The work of the eyes is done. Go now and do the heart-work on the images imprisoned within you.
Rainer Maria Rilke
If your everyday life seems poor, don't blame it blame yourself admit to yourself that you are not enough of a poet to call forth its riches because for the creator there is no poverty and no indifferent place.
Rainer Maria Rilke
The future enters into us, in order to transform itself in us, long before it happens. (Rainer Maria Rilke)
Someday there will be girls and women whose name will no longer mean the mere opposite of the male, but something in itself, something that makes one think not of any complement and limit, but only life and reality: the female human being.
Rainer Maria Rilke
Art too is just a way of living, and however one lives, one can, without knowing, prepare for it; in everything real one is closer to it, more its neighbor, than in the unreal half-artistic professions, which, while they pretend to be close to art, in practice deny and attack the existence of all art - as, for example, all of journalism does and almost all criticism and three quarters of what is called (and wants to be called) literature.
Rainer Maria Rilke
Not since Moses has anyone seen a mountain so greatly.
Rainer Maria Rilke
Young people, who are beginners in everything, cannot yet know love: they have to learn it.
Rainer Maria Rilke
Love is something difficult and it is more difficult than other things because in other conflicts nature herself enjoins men to collect themselves, to take themselves firmly in the hand with all their strength, while in the heightening of love the impulse is to give oneself wholly away.
Rainer Maria Rilke
The great renewal of the world will perhaps consist in this, that man and maid, freed of all false feelings and reluctances, will seek each other not as opposites, but as brother and sister, as neighbors, and will come together as human beings.
Rainer Maria Rilke
Death is the side of life which is turned away from us.
Rainer Maria Rilke
He was a poet and hated the approximate.
Rainer Maria Rilke
Just as the creative artist is not allowed to choose, neither is he permitted to turn his back on anything: a single refusal, and he is cast out of the state of grace and becomes sinful all the way through.
Rainer Maria Rilke
If only we arrange our life according to that principle which counsels us that we must hold to the difficult, then that which now still seems to us the most alien will become what we most trust and find most faithful. (Rainer Maria Rilke)
Read as little as possible of literary criticism - such things are either partisan opinions, which have become petrified and meaningless, hardened and empty of life, or else they are just clever word-games, in which one view wins today, and tomorrow the opposite view. Works of art are of an infinite solitude, and no means of approach is so useless as criticism.
Rainer Maria Rilke
I could give you no advice but this: to go into yourself and to explore the depths where your life wells forth.
Rainer Maria Rilke
A billion stars go spinning through the night, blazing high above your head. But in you is the presence that will be, when all the stars are dead.
Rainer Maria Rilke
If you trust in Nature, in the small Things that hardly anyone sees and that can so suddenly become huge, immeasurable; if you have this love for what is humble and try very simply, as someone who serves, to win the confidence of what seems poor: then everything will become easier for you, more coherent and somehow more reconciling, not in your conscious mind perhaps, which stays behind, astonished, but in your innermost awareness, awakeness, and knowledge.
Rainer Maria Rilke